


Relative Normal

by octoberburns



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Faeries - Freeform, Friends With Benefits, Unexplained Plot References, Urban Fantasy, Wild Hunt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:28:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22763218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/octoberburns/pseuds/octoberburns
Summary: Sofia would love to be able to say her life is normal—except, no, wait, she can't. Her best friend is a faery, her best friend's frenemy-with-benefits is an asshole suit fetishist with a violent streak, and the fucking Wild Hunt won't leave well enough alone. It's a weird world to live in, for a regular human with no interest or inclination to the supernatural.The alternative is giving Nadja up, though, and that's just not going to happen.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	Relative Normal

**Author's Note:**

> A new story for January (late again, sorry, seasonal depression is a real asshole). I first started developing Nadja as a character about ten years ago, and I've never published anything I've written about her, so this one was real fun.
> 
> Thanks as always to Ashley, Alex, and the rest of the gang. You're all shining stars and I couldn't do this without you.

In most ways, Sofia would have said her life was pretty normal. She had an ordinary job that she was using to put herself through an ordinary Public Affairs degree—always a safe bet in a government town—and on the weekends she liked to get drunk and go out dancing. She had never gotten into any strange hobbies: she made collages with pictures cut from fashion magazines, watched mainstream TV shows (which she pirated like any self-respecting millennial, thank you very much), and listened to pop, R&B, and whatever was on the radio. She lived with her best friend in a one-bedroom apartment in the cheap part of Lowertown, and, alright, maybe that was a little weird, but it wasn’t like they needed the living room for anything. If Nadja wanted to sleep in a bedroom with no door, that wasn’t Sofia’s problem; it kept the rent down, which was the important part, and probably the most normal thing of all.

But that was where normal stopped, because in reality Nadja was a faery. And, actually, Sofia’s life wasn’t particularly normal at all.

It had been five years since they’d met, and Nadja had always been a bit weird (see also: sleeping in a bedroom with no door). Sofia had always just chalked it up to the regular human sort of weirdness. Obviously. Whose first thought when someone was a bit weird was _faeries?_

Other than Nadja’s, anyway. Her opinion on the matter resoundingly did not count.

Sofia had been seventeen when Nadja first stumbled into her life. Back then she was still working as a hostess at The Diner That Shall Not Be Named; Nadja had been the new waitress, brittle-edged and beautiful and barely sixteen. Sofia had been the one to show her the ropes, shield her from their dickbag manager’s temper, and give her her first cigarette. When Nadja had graduated high school a year and a half later and mentioned wanting to move out, they had found a place together; when Sofia had been fired a few months after that for dipping into the till ( _completely_ justified, dickbag had been withholding her share of the tips), Nadja had also quit in solidarity.

That had been nearly three years ago, and they were still sharing the same trashy little apartment—faery revelations and all the bullshit that went along with them notwithstanding—so they must have been doing something right. It wasn’t like Sofia could blame Nadja for having withheld her background until six months ago, anyway—because, like she said, who in their right mind would have assumed faeries? Again, aside from Nadja, but even she had only suspected: it turned out her bio-dad was a grade-A asshole who had knocked up her very human mother at a party, only to disappear a week later, never to be seen again by the mortal world. Nadja had been seeing bizarre shit since she was a kid, but she hadn’t actually understood what any of it meant until Cillian O’Donovan had turned up in her life last winter—and Cillian was a piece of work all his own.

Things had settled down in the months since he had manufactured a mess to throw them into and dragged Nadja’s otherworldly heritage into the open, an event they had taken to referring to as the Wild Hunt Incident. Nadja and Sofia had gotten back to their lives as well as they could manage, and it had even mostly worked. Alright, so Cillian was still around, like the red wine stain you just couldn’t get out of your baby pink dress, but at least he wasn’t actively causing trouble anymore. The important thing was, balancing a human life with the newfound understanding of her nature made Nadja happy—properly happy, maybe for the first time ever. And there was very little Sofia wouldn’t have given to see her best friend happy.

Even if said best friend was an idiot who didn’t care to pay attention to things like “below freezing temperatures” and “proper cold weather clothing.”

It was nearly 11:30 by the time Sofia got home from work. Jingling her overladen keychain, she unlocked the door and braced her shoulder against it to shove it open—it always stuck in cold weather—then did the same in reverse to shut it again. “I’m home!” she called.

No response. The big TV was flickering magenta and teal the living room that was Nadja’s bedroom—bisexual lighting, Sofia noted, that checks out—but there was no sign of its occupant. Sofia hung up her coat and dropped her purse in her bedroom (also empty of Nadja), and wandered into the kitchen. Maybe there would be a message about her roommate’s whereabouts on the whiteboard on the fridge.

Or, as she might discover when she passed the glass door to the balcony, her roommate could be sitting outside in the snow with all the exterior lights off and not a stitch of winter gear in sight.

Sofia slung the door open with an exasperated noise. “I swear to god, Nadja, why do you keep _doing_ this?”

Nadja looked up in vague surprise. She didn’t seem to have noticed Sofia’s tone. “Hey,” she said. “I didn’t realize how late it was. How was the porn store?”

The twenty-four hour convenience store where Sofia worked sold a lot of things. Most of them were not porn. Regardless, she and Nadja had been referring to her workplace exclusively by that name since her second month on the evening shift, because a certain brand of customer just couldn’t seem to resist the allure of buying skin mags from a pretty young woman working alone at night. “Fine. Minimally sketchy today,” Sofia said, refusing to allow the distraction. “What are you doing out here? Don’t tell me faeries are immune to frostbite.”

“What? Oh, right,” Nadja said. She shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe. The cold’s never bothered me.”

Sofia pegged her with a resigned look. “That’s some kind of Wild Hunt bullshit, isn’t it,” she said. “Alright, get inside, you’re making me cold just looking at you.”

Nadja laughed. “You sound like my mama,” she said, and unfolded her long legs from where they were curled up on one of the sun-bleached plastic deck chairs they kept out on the balcony next to the patio table and the ashtray.

“I sound like my grandmother,” Sofia corrected, moving back out of the balcony doorway. “Seriously, come on, I don’t want to let all the heat out.”

Nadja stepped delicately over the threshold and slid the door closed behind her. She didn’t look like a faery right now—didn’t, most of the time, even at home, except for in the way that she always kind of did. She was just a sharp, slender, model-tall girl in terrycloth shorts and an oversized t-shirt, with rich brown skin and golden-brown eyes and asymmetrically styled natural curls that fell to just below her jawline. But in the dim half-illumination of the city lights at night there was something otherworldly about her, something strange and disturbing and enthralling all at once—especially in moments like this, when she had no reason to be on her guard.

She had always been like that. And it still gave Sofia a possessive little thrill that she got to see it, Nadja unselfconscious and entirely herself, in a way that no one else ever did: not her parents, not their friends, not the local faeries, not even Cillian. Nadja belonged always and entirely to herself, but a very small part of her belonged to Sofia, too.

God, she thought, I am such a fucking lesbian.

“Seriously, though,” she said. “What were you doing out there? And why aren’t any of the lights on?”

“I turned them off,” Nadja said, very reasonably, like that actually explained anything. “I was talking to some of—them. You know.”

For reasons that were not entirely clear to Sofia, Nadja rarely used the word “faery”—let alone any other more specific terms—to describe either herself or anyone else. The “them” she was referring to were the solitary faeries of the city: intelligent animals, goblins and house spirits, little imp-like creatures, and other, stranger things that Sofia could only see when they chose to remove their glamour and allow it. Nadja had always been able to see them; they had, apparently, been coming around to keep a wary eye on her for years.

Oh, right, it turned out there was a reason she’d always liked sleeping near the balcony door after all: for some ungodly reason she found the quiet chatter of her inhuman observers _soothing_.

“I didn’t know they actually talked to you,” Sofia said. She cast a suspicious glance out the balcony window. “Am I going to offend them if I turn the damn light on? I need dinner.”

“No,” Nadja said, laughter in her voice. “Most of them have left, anyway.” Her eyes lingered on what, to Sofia, appeared to be an empty patch of railing in a way that clearly indicated that “most” was entirely literal.

“Hm,” Sofia pronounced, and flicked the kitchen light on. Just like that everything was normal again, and Nadja’s otherworldly grace retreated to a manageable distance. She was just Sofia’s best friend, beautiful and beloved.

“Hi,” she said, tugging Nadja down to her level to kiss her lightly. “It’s good to be home.”

Nadja’s hand skimmed over the curve of her waist as she folded herself down onto one of the kitchen chairs. “Nice to see you, too,” she said. “Get some fucking food, Sofia.”

While Nadja watched, Sofia went rifling through their cabinets in search of an acceptable dinner. The fridge yielded nothing; the pantry cupboard, only a sad box of crackers and some canned soup. The alcohol cabinet was stocked, of course, but that wasn’t enough to make up for the dire truth: they desperately needed to do some grocery shopping.

“On second thought,” Sofia said, “wanna go to the diner?”

Predictably, Nadja had forgotten to eat while she was communing with her faery brethren. She threw on some real clothes while Sofia changed out her work shirt for a tank top and hoodie she deemed acceptable to be seen in on the Market at midnight. In short order they were out of the apartment—yanking on the sticky door to force it closed—and down the stairs, trudging through the crystallized winter air to their favourite late-night food spot: the main competitor to The Diner That Shall Not Be Named, and the exclusive recipient of their mutual patronage.

They were settled in one of the smaller booths and looking over their menus when Nadja said casually, “I dragged Cillian in here once.”

Sofia tried to picture Cillian, who she had never seen in anything less than a three-piece suit, sitting on the vinyl seats of a tacky fifties-Americana-style diner with a front end of a car for a host stand, and felt like she’d been clotheslined. “Seriously?”

Nadja nodded, taking a sip of her water. There was a compressed twist of amusement to her lips when she set it down. “He eats his burgers with a knife and fork.”

“Oh my _fucking god_ ,” Sofia said, in equal measure appalled and impressed.

“It was especially weird,” Nadja said musingly, “because I’d seen him rip someone’s throat out with his teeth, like, three days before that.”

“Yikes,” Sofia said, firmly instructing herself to just pretend it was something out of a movie. She was never going to get over how casually Nadja talked about that sort of thing, or how much it freaked her out that her best friend was regularly associating with people capable of that. But it wasn’t likely to stop anytime soon, and the only coping mechanism she had was to push it out of her mind. The alternative was giving up on being part of Nadja’s life, and, well, that wasn’t an option. Faeries just weren’t like humans—and, honestly, the Wild Hunt Incident had been pretty brutal even by faery standards. On balance, Cillian tearing someone’s throat out like a hound wasn’t the worst thing she’d seen.

Focus on the normal stuff, she thought, and said, “Then why the fuck is he so fussy about a _burger?_ ”

Nadja, of course, was impervious to the things that made normal humans uncomfortable. “Honestly, I have no idea,” she said. “I’m pretty sure his idea of proper human social behaviour is stuck in the rich asshole 1940s.”

“What a prick,” Sofia said, and gave up on pretending she was going to order anything other than a deluxe cheeseburger with fries and a mocha milkshake. She set her menu down. “Explains the suits, I guess.”

“You know he lives in the Château Laurier?”

“The fucking hotel? Are you for real?”

“Dead serious.”

Sofia groaned and put her face in her hands. “What is wrong with him. Isn’t it, like, three hundred dollars a night?”

“He has a _suite_ , so, probably more like five hundred,” Nadja said, biting back laughter as a server came over to take their order. “In fairness, I don’t think he’s actually paying with real money.”

“Faeries,” Sofia grumbled, “are bullshit.”

“Uh-huh,” Nadja said, without the slightest hint of resentment.

They made their order. Nadja requested an old-fashioned and a french toast sandwich with maple syrup, which was a cursed dinner combination if Sofia had ever heard one, and they settled in to wait. Sofia toyed with the packets of jam, considering how many she could slip into her purse before it got suspicious. “You’re not having any trouble with him?” she said finally.

The smile Nadja gave her was entirely unfeigned. “You’re sweet, Sofie. Really, I’m not. We’re cool.” Wild Hunt Incident notwithstanding, she didn’t need to add. “I could do without some of the people he hangs around with, but he’s fine.”

“I just don’t know how you can trust anything he says,” Sofia said.

Nadja shrugged. “Well, that’s the thing, right? I can’t. But I know that, and he also knows better than to trust me. He’s a fuckhead, but after everything that happened… we’re even. You’d be surprised how well it works.”

“Faeries,” Sofia said.

“Absolute bullshit,” Nadja agreed, and reached across the table to take her hand.

The rest of dinner went by without incident. Their food arrived with commendable swiftness—in addition to the syrup, Nadja smothered her sandwich (swiss cheese, egg, and two kinds of pork product) with blackberry jam, which was just getting more cursed by the minute—and they spent the meal gossiping about the latest round of heterosexual drama in their extended friend group. It was nearly one in the morning by the time they left. As they wandered home Nadja—comfortably loose with drink and still apparently impervious to the cold—slung her arm over Sofia’s shoulders without even bothering to do up her coat. Sofia looped her arm around Nadja’s waist in turn and they made their way home in comfortable companionship.

They had left the Market and were winding their way into the residential streets of Lowertown when a lump of shadow detached itself from a nearby alleyway and stepped in front of them.

“So,” the shadow said, his voice sounding strangely distorted, “you’re Cillian’s girl, are you?”

Sofia squinted up at him. He was oddly indistinct; for some reason she couldn’t seem to focus on his face.

Nadja, apparently, had no such problem. “I’m not anyone’s girl,” she said, a hard edge creeping into her voice that Sofia only ever heard when it was directed at someone else.

“No?” said their mysterious interloper. He seemed to be laughing. “So he’s your man, then?”

Nadja snorted disbelief. “Oh, absolutely fucking not.”

It was hard to tell, with the man still so weirdly blurry, but Sofia thought he was taken aback by that. “What—you don’t claim anyone?” he said. His attention seemed to sharpen. “What about her?”

With a thrill of fear, Sofia realized he was talking about her.

“Oh, no,” Nadja said casually, her grip tightening around Sofia’s shoulders. “She absolutely _is_ mine. Glamour off, asshole. You wanna talk to me, you make sure she can see you too.”

The man heaved a sigh. “Fine. I guess I can indulge your little pet.”

He popped abruptly into focus. Sofia almost wished he hadn’t. He was huge, broad and hulking, with teeth too big for his mouth and irises that were glowing bronze rings against the darkness of the night. There were smears around his eye sockets, like he was oozing darkness out of his tear ducts, and more of the same black fluid crusted under his claws—and unlike the tidy, well-kept claws she had seen on Cillian once or twice, these were massive, nearly overgrown, and looked like a tetanus infection waiting to happen. And there was something off about the way he moved, too, like his legs were jointed wrong.

It made Sofia want to bolt, and gave her the creeping suspicion that that was exactly what he wanted. Resolutely, she locked her knees and planted her feet where she stood.

A pause hung awkwardly in the air for a moment, and then a flash of disappointment crossed the man’s face. Abruptly Sofia realized he really had expected her to scream and run, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from breaking into giggles. Suddenly, somehow, this situation didn’t seem like anything they couldn’t handle.

“Well?” Nadja said, sounding exquisitely bored. “What do you want?”

The stranger shifted his focus back to her. “Cillian O’Donovan,” he said. “I want to take his fucking head.”

“How original,” Nadja said. “You’re gonna have to get in line. I’ve never met anyone as talented at pissing people off as that fucker.”

Sofia snorted.

That obviously hadn’t been what the man had wanted to hear. “Quit running your mouth,” he snapped. “I’m challenging him. He wants to play Master of the Hunt? He’s gonna have to hold the title.”

“This was going better for you when you thought I’d agree I was his girl, huh,” Nadja said, almost sympathetic. “I don’t carry messages for the Wild Hunt. You want to challenge him? Tell him your fucking self. I’m not doing anything for you.”

“I’m not giving you a choice,” the man said, menace dripping from his voice.

Oh, you’re in for it now, Sofia thought.

Nadja laughed outright.

There had always been something just a little unnerving about her laughter, full-throated and wild and touched with recklessness. Apparently the effect it had on people wasn’t restricted to humans: the man actually took half a step back, then looked furious with himself as he realized the show of weakness. Nadja was grinning openly at him by then, and Sofia registered with a little thrill that she was letting her own glamour go, the humanity bleeding out of her before their very eyes.

“You know,” she said, as glimmering gold highlights chased themselves across her face and down her throat, “Cillian himself tried to use me against the last Master of the Hunt. Wanna take a guess at how well that worked out for him?”

The Wild Hunt Incident. “I know what happened. Everyone knows,” the stranger snapped, but he sounded less sure of himself than he’d been thirty seconds ago. “He lost his nerve.”

“Sure, maybe,” Nadja said. Horns sprouted from her forehead, shimmering blue and violet—only an inch or two long, but unmistakably there, and she didn’t even flinch. “And why do you think that was? Oh, wait, I know: because I _wouldn’t fucking do what he told me_.”

She was wholly inhuman now—her ears pointed, her canines sharp, her features just off enough to be unsettling, her face and hands eerily shadowed in streaks of the same blue and violet that coloured her horns. Her eyes, which Sofia had believed until six months ago were a natural honey brown, were a galaxy swirl of cerulean and purple shot through with flecks of gold, luminous even in the dim streetlamp lighting. She was a glory and a monster, deadly and inhuman and wrong against the backdrop of a mundane city night. She was a thunderstorm in the shape of a person. She still had her arm around Sofia’s shoulder, and Sofia could feel every hair on her body standing straight up with the dual instinct to run away without looking back and to melt into that cutting beauty and never let go.

Look, Sofia had watched The Lord of the Rings, like basically everyone else in the known universe. She had seen Cate Blanchett’s “beautiful and terrible as the dawn” speech, and been just as obsessed with it as every other gay girl she had known—but, it had to be admitted, she had never really understood it.

She had Nadja now. She knew.

“So he’s weak,” their interloper was saying. “If I took over—“

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Nadja cut in. “Let’s get one thing straight. I was _there_ when Cillian’s plan went sideways. If I wasn’t scared of Cillian O’Donovan, or the King of Whispered Words, _or_ the last Master of the Hunt—my own fucking _father_ , in case you’ve forgotten—then what the fuck makes you think you fucking rate?”

Other faeries didn’t seem to react to Nadja in quite the same way Sofia did, but there was still something powerful and disconcerting about her unmasked self that could shake even them. Their would-be assailant, for one, had a look on his face like he’d abruptly realized he had bitten off way more than he could chew. He raised his hands placatingly. “Alright! Fuck’s sake,” he said. “I won’t challenge your asshole boyfriend, fine. Happy?”

“Oh, no. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,” Nadja said. Her words carried the force of—not a mere command, but an inevitability, like she was reordering the whole world on nothing but the sound of her voice. “You’ll challenge him as you like. And when you do?” She smiled, every bit as sweet and dangerous as it would have been with a mouth full of blood. “You tried to command me. For that, I’ll be there to watch him rip you limb from fucking limb.”

Sofia didn’t feel anything, but when Nadja pronounced that final syllable the man reeled back hard like she’d slapped him across the face. It was his expression more than anything else that made Sofia realize—maybe Nadja being around someone who could rip people’s throats out was no big deal, actually.

Maybe, for all her delicate grace, she was already more dangerous than anyone who might try to cross her.

“Now _go_ ,” she ordered, and in that single word echoed the crash of thunder, the blast of horns, the frenzied belling of a pack of hunting hounds.

He fled.

For one frozen moment Sofia almost wanted to follow him—could barely stand to look at this cracklingly electric person who was still standing, casual as you please, with her hip against Sofia’s and her arm over her shoulders. Clouds blew across the sky, scuttled and menacing; the wind had been made specifically to tangle through Nadja’s hair and set her unbuttoned coat whipping around a body too slender for all the power it contained.

And then she shifted her weight and blew out an exasperated sigh and she was Nadja, just Nadja, for all that her eyes still glowed and her skin still glittered and horns still split the line of her forehead.

“Wow,” Sofia said. “That was… extremely hot, actually.”

Nadja let out a bark of startled laughter. The look she gave Sofia was sly. “Liked that, did you?”

Sofia’s only answer was to yank her down into a kiss and shove her back against the nearby building, and demonstrate exactly how much she had _liked that_.

Nadja was looking gratifyingly mussed when Sofia let her go, which was an intriguing reversal of their usual dynamic. Before she could think better of it, Sofia said, “We are going home, you are eating me out until I beg you to stop.”

Nadja licked her lips. “You saw what I just did to someone else who tried to order me around,” she said, but there was a smile in the corners of her mouth.

Sofia planted her hands on Nadja’s chest and leaned in, grinding against her. Nadja still hadn’t put her glamour back on; her eyes were dizzying.

“Well?” Sofia said. “What do you plan on doing to me, then?”

Nadja exhaled a slow breath, winding her arms around Sofia’s shoulders and pulling her into a kiss that was soft and thorough and entirely overwhelming. “Anything you want, Sofie,” she said against her mouth. “Let’s go home.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [twitter](http://twitter.com/october_burns). I have a [blog](http://octoberburns.wordpress.com/). Come chat writing and book recs with me! And if you like my stories, I'd love it if you'd help support my work.


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